"Out of a ruin a new symbol emerges, and a landscape finds form and comes alive." John Brinckerhoff Jackson
The Nellis Range Complex: Landscape of Conjecture Exhibition: October 1 - November 14, Guided Bus Tour: October 9 - 10
The Nellis Range is the largest and most secretive restricted area in the United States. Foremost, it is a high-tech landscape of electronic warfare, with much of the land used for combat training by the Air Force, which conducts large-scale war games over the range and within the 12,000 square-mile restricted air space above and around it. Also within the range are several complexes with distinct functions and histories, including the base at Groom Lake (aka Dreamland and Area 51), a "secret" Air Force base which is known as the development, test, and evaluation site for numerous advanced aircraft and weapons systems. Since being sealed off from public access as a bombing range during World War II, the 5,000 square-mile Nellis Range has become a sort of landscape museum, with contrasting historical layers representing the stages of transformation of the American West. Preserved within the range are Paiute and Shoshone campsites as well as old mining towns. The Nellis Range Complex: Landscape of Conjecture examines the phycsical Range, and the wide range of perspectives and ideas that this mysterious landscape elicits.
Earthworks and Entropy Exhibition: December, 1999
A contemporary photographic display about earthworks, art made by the shaping of earthen material. The exhibit explores the interaction of these works with their cultural and physical contexts, and the sculpting forces of erosion, which adds another quality to their morphology. Lectures and presentations will be part of the exhibit, including a presentation by Smithson scholar Hikmet Loe, who has unearthed some interesting new material about the building of the Spiral Jetty.
